Conan O’Brien spoofs Apple iPad 2 event as "a little bit cocky"

Comedian Conan OBrien presented a parody of Apple's iPad 2 event video on his show last night, introducing it by saying, "I personally think that the people at Apple are starting to get a little bit cocky."

The clip took aim at Apple's minimalistic product videos that portray the company's products against blank backgrounds while narrators speak effusively about how great their new features are.

The spoof (below), ironically doesn't play on the iPad because TBS distributes its videos using a Flash applet. OBrien has successfully leveraged the Internet, particularly Twitter and Facebook, to reach his fan base after leaving his old network in a dispute and moving to TBS.

OBrien's staff of actors posed as Apple executives who poked at the new iPad 2 as being "the culmination of literally two to three meetings. It's truly incredible how little we did," specifically skewering the new model as "adding two holes with cheap cameras in them" and predicting that "people would just go nuts" for the model.

Other presenters lobbed jokes aimed at Steve Jobs' signature black turtleneck and the variety of "non specific ethnic accents" of various executives that speak in Apple videos.

The video ends with the tagline: "iPad 2. You'll buy it no matter what we say."

Flash and Xoom

Few new consumer electronic devices are well recognized enough to serve as parody material, but Apple's iPods, iPhone and iPad have been regularly spoofed by late night comics and in shows such as "Saturday Night Live," providing millions of dollars worth of free advertisement for Apple.

Somewhat ironically, viewers report that the clip is being shown with ads that include paid spots for Motorola's Xoom tablet, which it hopes will compete with iPad 2 this year. Motorola's Flash-based Xoom ads by Verizon have also entered paid circulation on AppleInsider, prompting at least one reader to complain that the ads are sapping the performance of his quad processor machine.

Flash playback is a promoted feature of both Motorola's Xoom and Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb platform, although Adobe is still working out the kinks to get Flash Player delivered for tablets nearly a year after it began its campaign attempting to badger Apple into supporting its web browser plugin on the iPad.